State-by-state polling results from 2018 and 2019, provided to me by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, show 56 percent or more of adults favoring abortion rights in Colorado, Maine, and Arizona, where Republican incumbents are endangered. Strong abortion-rights majorities of at least 55 percent are also evident in Michigan and Minnesota—where the GOP harbors longer-shot hopes of dislodging Democrats—and in Alaska, where an independent candidate remains within range of GOP Senator Dan Sullivan. In all of those states, white evangelical Christians, traditionally the constituency most focused on installing conservative justices, make up just 15 percent or less of the population.
But in Iowa, only a slim 52 percent majority favors abortion rights. Support dips to 49 percent in North Carolina and Georgia; 48 percent in Texas, Montana, and Kansas; and 47 percent in South Carolina. Evangelical Christians represent nearly one-fourth of the population in Kansas and South Carolina, one-fifth in North Carolina, and just below that in Georgia and Iowa. In all of those states, Mackowiak says, “these cultural issues are net unhelpful to the Democrats.” Support for legal abortion falls even further, to the low 40s, in both Kentucky and Alabama.
Comparable state-by-state data isn’t available on the ACA’s protections for patients with preexisting conditions. But the 2018 election results suggest that defending those provisions was an effective argument for Democrats virtually everywhere. National polling earlier this year by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation reported that not only did 95 percent of Democrats and 83 percent of independents consider preserving those protections “extremely” or “very” important, but so did 71 percent of Republicans. More recent Kaiser polling, conducted in partnership with “The Cook Political Report,” found that voters in Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona all gave Biden big leads over Trump on the issue of protecting patients with preexisting conditions—a measure of how widely Democrats lead on that concern.
